Mission Statements Often Trite

Some Experts See Company `Visions' As Corporate Pablum

HOUSTON - — At Browning-Ferris Industries, it is etched on a polished granite slab hung in the lobby of company headquarters.

At Randalls Food Markets, it is framed and displayed in all 121 Texas stores.

At Andersen Consulting, partners who fail to recite it on demand have to buy lunch.

U.S. corporations have become consumed by the mission statement - those few sentences that act as organizational divining rods, describing a company's basic purpose.

In crafting "missions," "visions" and "values," many companies have set up task forces, hired consultants and sent scores of executives to retreats to explore their common purpose.

These companies - as well as nonprofit organizations, government agencies and even individuals - are trying to take stock of who they are, what they do and how to do it better.

"The mission statement tells an organization, here's what our purpose of being is, here's what we do for a living," said Claire Bloom, a management consultant and base support officer at the Port Smith Naval Shipyard at Port Smith, N.H.

Bloom argues that without one, the internal bureaucracy will inevitably consume an organization, and the primary functions performed for customers will take a back seat.

Some experts, however, have begun to question whether the time and effort that corporate America spends to draft missions amount to much more than busy work.

Often, the statements sound trite, uninspiring and contain corporate pablum. The worst are statements that look good with their lofty language but appear hypocritical, because the organization doesn't measure up to them.

"It's a waste of time and money and people's patience if it's simply a PR statement, and too many are PR statements," said Barbara Ley Toffler, owner of Resources for Responsible Management, a Boston management consulting firm.

Business experts also criticize statements that use language such as "providing high-valued service to our customers" and "striving to increase shareholder value."

"That's all motherhood and apple pie. I think the test is, if it's a statement that can be in anybody's mission statement, then it's not an effective mission statement," said John Rau, dean of the business school at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., and former CEO of LaSalle National Bank in Chicago.

"I think in the worst case, they can be wishful thinking and make you think you've done something when you haven't. In the best case, they can be a powerful way to communicate direction," Rau said.

Socially aware executives, such as Robert Wood Johnson of Johnson & Johnson Co., spawned the mission statement concept more than 50 years ago.

The Johnson credo is still used for guidance at the New Brunswick, N.J.-based health care products firm, spokesman Jeff Leebawm said. Outside experts have commented that the statement served the company well during the Tylenol poisoning incidents in 1982 and 1986.

Some surveys indicate more than half of all big companies now have mission statements. But some corporate chieftains have questioned their need.

Most notable is Louis Gerstner, who, when he assumed the top job at IBM Corp. in 1993, was widely quoted as saying, "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision."

IBM spokesman Tom Beermann explained, "What he was referring to at that time was a company that was on the way to losing $8 billion, and so there clearly were some drastic measures that needed to be taken in terms of operating the business. So a vision was the last thing we needed, to sit around in a room and figure one out."